Is there any way to track whether an email has been opened?

Question

Hey,

I'm beginning to work on mailing-list software we use internally (EDIT: though we send emails externally as well, so we can't enforce policy on mail clients). Is there any way to track whether, when I send an email to a particular user, that email has been opened as opposed to being marked as junk or being deleted without being opened?

The simplest approach that I thought of was to serve a one-pixel custom image that would need to be loaded from our servers, but a number of mail clients block this approach. Is there an alternate approach that gets better data?

Answer 1

Mail clients block pretty much all of these kinds of attempts. The best idea is to give them an image that they would want to see if they read the message, and therefore they choose to display images in their mail client.

Answer 2

There is no bulletproof way to check if a user has read your mail. And there shouldn't be IMO.

Answer 3

You can ask for a read receipt (an email feature), but most users consider this a real pain.

Answer 4

If this is internal I assume you own the IMAP server (or Exchange or what-else-have-you). It'd be kind of ugly, but that would be the "proper" way to know if the email client has at least displayed the message. You can't really guarantee that it's been read of course :-p

Answer 5

You could potentially send out the mail with "read receipts" requested and then enforce the policy that all mail clients automatically send notices upon opening.

Answer 6

Quick notes to whoever will be using this later:

If you want a simple approach and don't mind paying a bit, check out www.didtheyreadit.com and www.readnotify.com; these abstract away a lot of any implementation you'll have to deal with.

Answer 7

Add a transparent gif to the email. When your users will display the image, it will query your server and adds a line to your document. It is aka render rate. This is what email marketers used to call "open rate".

You can use MxM (http://www.m--x--m.net) to deliver your emails. They add that automatically and manage deliverability and antispam for you. We have open sourced that piece of code but it is in Python.

(disclosure, I am the founder of this company)